Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Ann Coulter to Donald Trump: Beware the Former Trumpers

Donald Trump has a boatload of problems. Ann Coulter, the author of a 2016 book titled “In Trump We Trust,” is now one of them.

A week ago, when he signed a $1.3 trillion spending bill with nothing for his promised border wall, her frustrations with him, expressed frequently in her syndicated columns, turned into fury. “Congratulations, President Schumer!” she tweeted to more than 1.9 million followers. She also fantasized on Twitter about his impeachment.

During an appearance at Columbia University on Tuesday night, she referred to him as a “shallow, lazy ignoramus.” And during a long conversation with me at The Times on Thursday afternoon, she sent him a warning about the wrath he’d face if the wall doesn’t rise: “The Former Trumpers should keep Donald Trump awake at night.”

Coulter isn’t just any Trump critic. She was one of his earliest, most prominent — and fiercest — advocates. He came down that escalator and ranted about Mexican rapists and she swooned. Understandably: His diatribes against immigrants were cribbed from her 2015 best seller, “¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole.” It was published around the time of his campaign announcement. She had sent him an advance copy.

“Perhaps no single writer has had such an immediate impact on a presidential election since Harriet Beecher Stowe,” David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, later observed in The Atlantic.

So Coulter was Trump’s muse. She was also his oracle, predicting his nomination and election back when most others still dismissed him as a joke. And she’s a barometer of, and tribune for, some of his core supporters, including her good friend Matt Drudge.